A. Technical Field of the Invention
This invention is in the field of hampers used for containing and transporting laundry, and particularly hampers that have an upright, assembled state and are collapsible into a collapsed state forming a relatively thin package for storage, display and transport.
B. Description of Related Prior Art
The prior art includes various collapsible laundry baskets and containers for use in the storage and transportation of laundry. These designs, however, all include one or more undesirable features. Some are bulky and inconvenient for display and sale; some are expensive to manufacture; some are difficult for the user to assemble. For example, U.S. Pat. Nos. 5,464,113 and 5,356,024 disclose a hamper composed of a flexible material stretched between two rigid frames by means of four, independent fully-removable legs or braces. This hamper requires the user to position and orient the legs, which is awkward while exerting great force to stretch the sheet material of the hamper by wedging the independent free ends of the legs between the hamper's rigid frames. U.S. Pat. No. 3,727,786 discloses a hamper formed of a body containing an elongated portion divided into four framed sections with hinges to allow folding and unfolding of the hamper. The hamper collapses into a package of considerable thickness due to the requirement of placing hinges at the edges of the framed sections, and requires additional manufacturing costs for the hinge mechanisms in the hamper body. U.S. Pat. No. 5,474,196 discloses a ready-to-assemble hamper including a bottom frame, a top frame, and a body panel joining the top and bottom frames fitting into recesses disposed upon the frames. This design discloses a hamper made of insufficiently flexible material to allow the most convenient packaging, and requires users to assemble the hamper with great care in order properly to position the hamper's components. U.S. Pat. No. 4,646,802 discloses a hamper composed of a bag removably-mounted to a supporting base defined by a pair of opposing scissor-linkages. This hamper presents the user with a design permitting the body of the hamper greatly to bulge and inadvertently to slip off of the supporting frame, while collapsing into a package only as small as the height of the supporting base itself. A still further prior art collapsible hamper has legs coupled to a frame by traditional hinges which limit movement of each leg to pivoting about a fixed axis lying parallel to the plane of the frame.